The invention relates generally to queue management, and more specifically to a method and system for analyzing and optimizing the distribution of work from a plurality of queues.
In many business processes, an individual or team has an assigned list or queue of items to work through. There may be several queues containing different types of items to be worked. Often these queues are combined in non-systematic or ad hoc ways as it is different and not well understood how to correlate across queues containing different types of items. This results in the items from the different queues being ranked in an order that may not represent their true relative value or worth.
Each individual or team has a limited number of items that it is able to work within a given period of time. Also, while there may be a value associated with working an item, there is also cost associated with working each item. Given a set of resources, it is often the team manager's or some other individual's job to assess the different queues over time and to decide how to best work the queues and the items within the queues in order to achieve the highest return on investment for the business. As the number of types of items increases, this task becomes more difficult. Also, given there is a cost to work each item, the return on the business' investment in working items reduces as the value associated with an item reduces. It is also the responsibility of the team manager or another individual to decide which items in a queue should not be worked at all. Sometimes it may be cost beneficial and increase a business' return on investment not to work particular items within a queue. There is no automated process for optimizing how and whether the items among many sets of queues should be worked.